The Critics

Your guide to movies, music and more...

The Grinch (G, 90mins)

This cheerful and brightly coloured animation is a vast improvement on Ron Howard’s live action version of Doctor Seuss’s classic story. From a gloomy mountain cave, the emerald miserablist Grinch (beautifully voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) glares down balefully on the insanely cheerful inhabitants of Whoville. He detests their endless bonhomie and is particularly irked by their addiction to Christmas. He and his dog Max are about to steal the entire festive season when The Grinch meets a remarkable little girl. It’s A

Christmas Carol for slow learners, of course, but this brisk cartoon is charming and funny.

Overlord (16, 110mins)

The word daft does not quite cover the spectacular silliness of Overlord, which feels like a fanciful video game but is not without a certain low charm. In a well-executed opening sequence, a group of quaking US paratroopers are dropped into the cauldron of Normandy on D-Day. Most do not survive, but a small group repair to a nearby village to destroy a German radio tower located in a church. Inside they find not just Nazis, but zombies, part of a ghastly SS experiment. They make the perfect villains, because no matter how many are slaughtered, it never quite seems enough: this cheerfully gory production certainly rolls its sleeves up.

They Shall Not Grow Old (12A, 99mins)

This Sunday marks the centenary of Armistice Day, and in this remarkable documentary, Peter Jackson has applied his heavy bag of cinematic tricks to archive footage. It all starts ordinarily enough, as the spoken recollections of veterans accompany images of raw recruits training for battle. Once the footage gets to Belgium and France, it explodes eerily into colour, making century-old, long-dead faces pop to life. Lip-readers have been used to add a soundtrack to the footage, so that we get to hear that unlucky generation utter cheery banalities on their way to the charnel houses of Ypres and the Somme.